resounding sabots when the Dean exorcised him in a loud line of Hamlet'; the terrible old maid from Copenhagen, who popped up in the village-street, and who smacked my venerable companion with her parasol; the long saunter through the corn in the ever-deepening coloured twilight of the North, while round us on every side, undulating, invading, darkening with the decline of the evening, rolled the triumphant, the universal, beech-woods.

Two years later, in 1874, I was once more in Copenhagen and the guest of Dr. Fog. In the meantime, the news of the complete recovery of Paludan-Müller, and the revival of his literary activity, had reached me through the channel not merely of the Danish newspapers, but of several very charming and genial letters from himself. He had sent me a new comedy, and an elegiac poem, called Adonis,' in which all the exquisite art, melody, and passion of his youth had once again found utterance. In arriving in the city, one of my first impulses was to pay my respects to the great poet; but circumstances crowded about me, and I allowed a week or so to go by. Then followed a brief visit to Lund in Sweden, to see the leaders of the poetical school then flourishing, under Professors Ljunggren and Lysander, in that ancient university. My constant companion, Dr. Fog, was proposing a visit to Paludan-Müller, when, on our return from Lund, I was somewhat abashed to find that he had called on me at Gammel Strand during our absence. There was, however, another side to this.

If the great poet could pay visits, Dr. Fog argued, he could perhaps dine out, and his sister and I were sent forth on a mission to try our luck in inviting him. If we could secure him for a night convenient to him, all that was brightest and best in Copenhagen was to be constrained to come too. But fortune was against us: if we had found him alone, it is possible that success might have crowned our efforts, for the poet had now wonderfully recovered his strength, and with it his curiosity. We proceeded to his house, No. 4 Ny-Adelgade, which was in the centre of the city, and not far from the fashionable KongensNytorv, but in a very squalid street, dirty and noisy, and with immediate surroundings painfully inappropriate to the genius of Paludan-Müller. That he continued to live in Ny-Adelgade, which was considered in those days not merely mean, but actually disreputable, was set down to the growing eccentricity of Mrs. Paludan-Müller.

The oddity of that extraordinary person had certainly increased since I saw her at Fredensborg in 1872. When we arrived, with our dinner-invitation on our lips, we were damped by being told that the poet had gone out for a walk, but that Mrs. Paludan-Müller would receive us. The fierce little lady, in fact, closed our retreat by peeping round the edge of the door, and commanding us to enter. She had aged considerably in two years, had become smaller, more acid, more dictatorial. Overwhelmed by the event, my companion lost her presence of mind, and blurted out the invitation, which it would have been wiser to suppress. The answer came at once-Impossible, my dear lady, impossible! I could not sanction it! Mr. Paludan-Müller is weak, he is good-natured; he is only too ready to go into society. It is my privilege to prevent it. I say to him, “You are too delicate, my dear, to mix with others; you must positively consider your health." Miss Fog feebly. asked whether the poet might not himself be appealed to- such old friends! so small a party! so early an hour!' The lady was quite obdurate, however: 'I could not trust him with your message. He is so weak, so good-natured. His place is at home, with me. I do not wish to dine abroad-why should he?'

This was all that we could get for our pains, and we withdrew, discomfited, my companion expatiating on the terrible nature of the bondage under which the poor great poet languished. Mrs. Paludan-Müller's absurd jealousy was growing with what it fed upon. If she traced a letter which her husband had written, of the most commonplace character, to anyone in the town, she would go to the recipient and ask leave to borrow it, refusing to give it up again. In 1874 she was said in Copenhagen to have been born before the French Revolution and to be nearly ninety years of age. This was manifestly an exaggeration, but she was certainly much older than her husband. Of her preposterous oddity, stories were everywhere current in Copenhagen, where she had perhaps not a single friend. Her love for her poet, whom she had married in his brilliant youth and her sombre middle age, had turned into a consuming egotism; she took care of him, indeed, so far as an almost maniacal parsimony would permit, but she divided him, as much as she possibly could, from all intercourse with the outer world. She could not prevent his perambulating the streets of Copen

hagen without her, since her own bodily strength was much abated; but she fumed and gasped for his return, rated him when he came back, and excluded so far as she possibly could all visitors from the wretched house in Ny-Adelgade, where her meanness forced him to reside. It is charitable to believe that the poor old creature was no longer the mistress of her mind.

On the next day, however, greatly daring, I went forth alone to brave once more the cabbage-stalks and the raucous voices of Ny-Adelgade. This time the poet was at home, and by some marvellous prevision of nature Mrs. Paludan-Müller did not make an appearance. I secured a couple of hours of extreme enjoyment. Paludan-Müller was lying stretched on the sofa when I entered; but he was quick to assure me that this was from laziness, not ill-health. He sprang gaily to his feet, and welcomed me with great affection. I thought that his beautiful face, as it beamed on me with the mild effulgence of benevolent welcome, looked younger than it had looked in 1872, although an intenser burnish shone on the smooth silver of his hair. He had, it was evident, recovered, in great measure, from the extreme agitation of the whole nervous system from which he suffered for many years, and from which he was only just emerging when I saw him, under such charming conditions, that summer's day at Fredensborg which I have already described. I had published in a London review an analysis of his most ambitious work, 'Kalanus,' which stands to his other poems much in the same relation that Prometheus Unbound' does to Shelley's. He spoke of my criticism with great kindness, and he was so good as to expatiate on what had been his intention in writing this drama, and on the general tenor of his epical and lyrical work.

With a touch of cunning, and definitely in the hope of pleasing him, I had opened an essay on his works with a word of homage to the memory of his father, Bishop Jens Paludan-Müller. I had been privately warned of the poet's cult for the paternal memory, which proceeded so far on the road to fanaticism that he was known to have broken off all commerce with an intimate acquaintance because, in reviewing a posthumous reprint of the Bishop's sermons, the critic had ventured to find fault, in a single case, with the reasoning. If I had been crafty, I had my reward; for Frederik PaludanMüller now spoke of this too, and quaintly remarked, with a

smile, You began your notice of me at the right place, when you spoke of my blessed Father!' He talked freely of the art of poetry, and of the dangers which, in his belief, it was now about to encounter from materialism and a coarse flatness of spirit. He said that poetry would never hold the hearts of men unless the eyes of the poets were cast habitually upwards, ready to catch the uncovenanted celestial vision, which comes when no one expects it, and is gone in an hour. There is no doubt that, in speaking thus, Paludan-Müller expressed with great sincerity at least one-half of his own conviction, which had indeed inspired him with some of the most glorious of his creations. But he is also, curiously enough, one of the most realistic of all the classic writers of Denmark, and there is perhaps no one of them all whose feet have been more firmly planted on the soil, and his attention more steadily fixed on the real aspects of life, than Paludan-Müller in Adam Homo,' the great satirical epic of his youth. It will hardly, I suppose, be questioned that this work, which appeared in 1841, is the most considerable single poem in the Danish language, and it is certainly the composition of one whose eyes could not be described as habitually cast upwards to the empty sky.

There is something very tantalising, however, in the thought that the curse of Babel militates against the chance of most English readers obtaining pleasure from this noble poet's writings. The ingenuity of man has not yet designed any means by which the magic of lyrical poetry in a strange language can be manifested to those who have not made acquaintance with that language. A Danish painter or musical composer needs no interpreter, and a Danish prose-writer, by good luck and faithful industry, may repeat his effects in a prose translation. But a poet speaks exclusively to those of his own clan, or to the few who take the trouble to become, for the time being, freedmen of that clan. It is therefore impossible to reproduce the charm of a writer like Paludan-Müller, whose enchantment must be taken for granted by the bulk of those who hear of him.

He lived not very long after I saw him last. His constitution was frail, and it did not survive the severe winter of 1876, which was singularly fatal to men of eminence in Scandinavia. Paludan-Müller died in Copenhagen on the 28th of December, having nearly completed his sixty-seventh year.

EDMUND GOSSE.

AN AIRSHIP VOYAGE.

AFTER weeks of waiting the great airship built by the firm of MM. Lebaudy Frères for the Morning Post' National Fund was ready for her journey to England. We had seen the stout canvas of her envelope cut out into symmetrical panels and sewn together into an enormous tapering cylinder over 100 yards long and 40 feet in diameter, and the heavy steel tubes of her framework and car welded into place and fitted with their countless suspending cables; we had watched the envelope gradually swelling with the hydrogen gas, the invisible force which, like a Djinn of the 'Arabian Nights' let loose from the huge stone bottles of sulphuric acid and the barrels of iron filings that encumbered the waste ground about the shed, was to raise a burden of some nine tons six thousand feet above the earth.

Awakened two

Then had followed the time of the first trials. or three hours before the gray autumnal dawn, we had waited more or less patiently up to the knees in dripping grass for the wind to fall or the fog to lift. At last, after days of patience, four trial flights had been accomplished; the airship had found herself, like the steamer of Mr. Kipling's story, and proved herself air-worthy; her designer, M. Julliot, had declared himself satisfied; and on the next favourable day she was to make her first real voyage straight from her shed at Moisson (near Mantes), across 120 miles of land and 80 miles of sea, to the Army Balloon Factory, South Farnborough.

A single preoccupation possessed the little party which ate and slept at the hotel of the Maison Rouge, and that preoccupation was the weather. When we had done justice to the excellent food our hostess provided to console us for our daily disappointment, over the good red wine, Louis Capazza, our pilot, would tell us stories of the air, while a French naval lieutenant, who was there to swing our compass, would cap them with legends of the sea, or our landlord would beguile the time with improbable tales of the motor-races in which he had taken part. But ever and anon one or the other of us would rise from his seat and, half-ashamed of his persistence, go out into the night to see how